Sir David Attenborough's Creatures, Great And Small

NEW YORK — He has traveled to the wildest, most remote places on Earth, from the depths of the Amazon rain forest to the Himalayas. Sir David Attenborough embraces nature wherever he finds it.

Even such a highly artificial environment as Central Park, a rigidly rectangular patch of green carved out of Manhattan's grid system, is a welcome sight to this man who has spent his working life making some of the most compelling documentaries about nature ever shown on television.

"Parks are wonderful," he said as he walked along one of Central Park's heavily traveled drives, speaking over the din of taxis and trucks. "I live next to a very large park in London, Richmond Park, where Henry VIII hunted deer. A park is no more artificial than the bottom of a leaf-cutter ant's nest."

But of course. The leaf-cutter ant.

Such multipart series as "The Living Planet" and "Life on Earth," sweeping treatments of the whole of life, have given Attenborough an encyclopedic knowledge of creatures great and small. Leaf-cutter ants, which line their underground quarters with bits of leaves that they have sliced into neat geometric shapes, come readily to mind -- his mind, that is -- to illustrate the point that human beings are not the only species that manipulate their environment.

Attenborough has spent the last three years filling up another volume of the natural-history encyclopedia he carries around in his head -- Volume "B," as in "birds." On various Tuesdays since July 20, the familiar Attenborough presence -- avuncular but not unbuttoned, professorial but not academic -- has been leading nature-lovers through hourlong programs exploring "The Life of Birds." In Chicago, the 10-part series has been airing at 9 p.m. Tuesdays on WTTW-Ch. 11 (check daily listings for changes).

With characteristic thoroughness, the series presents the wide variety of ways in which birds deal with the challenges they face: why most birds fly and some don't, how they find food, how they find a mate or, nudge nudge, mates, and how they raise their young.

Like previous Attenborough efforts, this BBC-produced program takes the whole world as its stomping ground. Attenborough and his crew, which included 48 camera operators, made 70 trips to 42 countries and filmed more than 9,000 species of birds. Considering the scope of the project, which included the use of computer animation to reconstruct the prehistoric ancestors of modern birds, it comes as little surprise that "The Life of Birds" cost $12 million to produce.

Attenborough decided to focus on winged wildlife as he thought about the types of animals that his viewers -- overwhelmingly urbanized in both England and America -- come in contact with in the course of their everyday lives, apart from pets. The answer: birds.

"They are the one thing that almost everybody, unless you're living in San Quentin, sees of the natural world everyday," the filmmaker said, sitting on a Central Park bench as joggers of all ages took their late-afternoon runs. "Birds are all around us. And yet, at the same time, they're really rather mysterious, because they suddenly stretch their wings and they're gone."

Throw in the beauty and variety of bird life and the worldwide appeal of bird-watching, and the series seems like a natural. And yet Attenborough cheerfully admits that he had to win over some doubters at first.

"There were people in television who said, `You mean 10 hours on birds?' " he said, his eyes growing wide in mock amazement. " `You mean one program that's entirely called "The Demands of the Egg"? Are you serious?' "

Such is his reputation, however, that the doubters eventually relented. Attenborough, whose brother is the director and actor Sir Richard Attenborough, has been making acclaimed natural-history films since he joined the BBC in 1952, after studying natural sciences at Cambridge University and serving in the Royal Navy. If Attenborough says an hour on eggs will make good television, how smart is it to bet against him?

One of the hallmarks of an Attenborough show is his seemingly limitless zest for getting out in the wild and having close encounters with the animals he's describing. In the first episode of "The Life of Birds," for instance, a kiwi, the flightless bird of New Zealand, was filmed at night making its way down a beach, poking its thin beak in the sand in search of shrimp. This was the first time the nocturnal bird had been filmed foraging for food, and its path along the beach led directly to a crouching Attenborough.

"Unusually among birds, it operates by smell," said Attenborough, explaining how he and his crew got the reclusive bird to share the screen with a human. "You can see as it works its way along the (beach) that there's a lot of rotten seaweed. So if I lie on the seaweed, it won't smell me. And it comes right up to you."